Consumers of telecommunications services are faced with many options when it comes to services. One of the more dynamic fields currently is the provision of multimedia services. Typically, a consumer will request multimedia services by accessing an application server. The application server will direct the consumer to one of a plurality of media proxies in a round robin fashion. The media proxy may then set up and tear down the call as is well understood and provide other multimedia related services.
The round robin approach suffers from some drawbacks. First, the round robin approach ignores the loads that are currently being experienced on the media proxies; for instance, there is no provision to evaluate loading on the media proxies before making the assignment. As such, a heavily loaded media proxy may still be assigned to provide services to a consumer just because it is next in the round robin cycle.
Second, the round robin approach ignores distances between the media proxy and the consumer. The distance may be a function of communication links, physical distance, and similar physical attributes. Distance introduces delay into the provision of services, which for multimedia applications can be extremely undesirable. The round robin approach assigns a media proxy to a consumer irrespective of whether another media proxy might be closer.
Thus, there is a need for a better technique to allocate media proxies to incoming requests.